Backing up is one of the necessary evils in todays modern digital lifestyle ,but one which is often put off. A few years ago we wouldn’t have thought about having to backup our phones, as they just contained a few texts and some phone numbers, but now they have photos, videos, apps, emails and events. How would you feel if you lost your phone today? How many irreplaceable items would you lose?

There are a few ways of backing up everything on your phone, some which require root , and some which don’t. This guide will take you through the various methods to make sure that all your important mobile data is kept up to date and safe.

If you haven’t made a copy of your precious photos and videos you have taken on your device, then now is the time to do it. Backing up will only take a few minutes , but could save you a lot of time if the worst happens. Getting into the habit of backing up every month or so is a great idea and means that the process will take less time.

For those that enjoy hacking and tweaking your Android device, making regular backups is always a great idea, as it means you can play around without having to worry about losing anything important.

—

1) Mount SD card

The easiest way to make a backup of most of the important data on your phone is to simply copy everything from the Sdcard, or internal memory. Doing this is simply a case of plugging your device into a computer and mounting as a disk drive.

2) Copy SD contents

Create a folder on your computer named ‘Android Backup’ or similar. Once the Sdcard has mounted on your computer, open it up, and drag all the contents into the backup folder. This will save your photos,music,downloads and some app settings. But what if we need to save more?

3) Backup contacts

One of the most frustrating things about losing your phone is the loss of contacts and the hassle of retrieving them. In Settings->Accounts and Sync->Google, make sure ‘Contacts’ is ticked. You can then access your contacts from www.google.com/contacts. From here you can export all contacts.

4) Use Titanium Backup

An easy solution for backing up all your apps and app data is to use Titanium Backup. This free app is available on the Market ,but requires root access. Once open , simply click the menu button and ‘batch’. Then run ‘Backup all user apps + system data.’

5) Run batch backup

Next press the ‘Run the batch operation’ button. Titanium is great as it will backup the state of all apps, even ones that are system or currently running. The process can take a few minutes if you have lots of apps installed.

6) Copy Titanium backup

Next remount the Sdcard on your computer and then copy the folder named ‘TitaniumBackup’ to your ‘Android Backup’ folder. To backup , open Titanium Backup and press the menu button , ‘batch’ and ‘Restore Missing Apps + All system data.’

7) Performing a Nandroid backup

The most complete and easiest way of backup up your phone is to perform a Nandroid backup. You will ned to have a custom recovery installed on your phone such as ClockWorkMod. Boot into recovery (usually by holding volume down button while turning the phone on)

8 ) Make the backup

A Nandroid backup is a total image of your devices current state, everything is saved in one go. The downside of a Nandroid is that you can’t restore to a different type of device. Go to Backup and Restore>Backup

9) Copy backup to PC

The recovery image file is stored on /clockworkmod/backup/ and then the file name is the date and time you made the recovery. Mount your SD card and then copy this file to the ‘Android Backup’ folder that we made earlier.

10) Restoring a Nandroid

To recover the image, simply boot into recovery again, then go to ‘backup and restore->restore’ and then choose the image date that you want to recover. It might be a good idea to rename the backups like ‘MIUI–12November-Stable’ so its easier to remember whats contained in each.